When Canada became a royal province in 1663, there were six male colonists of marriageable age for every European-born female. With a view to reducing this imbalance and to ensuring the settlement of the colony, Louis XIV subsidized the cost of passage to New France for nearly 770 young women between 1663 and 1673. When finances permitted, he granted each a dowry of 50 livres intended to facilitate their marriage and settlement.

Contrary to persistent legend, these girls were not prostitutes, but more often orphans raised at the General Hospital of Paris. Within months of their arrival in Canada, marriage to one of the colony’s many suitors followed. In the early 1680s Louis XIV sought to complete this policy of “feminization” by offering the “King’s Gift,” a dowry of 50 livres to every native candidate to intermarry. In Louisiana, at the time of the Company of the West, there was also an appeal to filles du Roi – or filles à la cassette (“casket girls”), as they were called there – 120 women volunteers were thus transported between 1719 and 1720.

The filles à la cassette should not be confused with the 200 “women of questionable reputation” who were deported to the Mississippi Valley in the era of political banishment inaugurated during the Regency. Most of these people had been imprisoned in the Salpêtrière (a former arsenal renovated by Louis XIV to house the poor) for begging, vagabondage, prostitution, and other crimes. One of these prisoners, Marie-Anne Lescau, inspired Abbé Prévost’s heroine in his Manon Lescaut.

Written in the form of 25 letters, the Nouveaux Voyages du baron de Lahontan convey the Canadian experiences of this soldier in France’s naval troop corps in the years 1683-94. In Letter II, the author waxed ironic in a passage related to King's Daughters, Casket Girls, Prostitutes, whom he characterized as “girls of average virtue” and whom “the spouse would chose ... in a manner much like the butcher who is going to select sheep in the middle of a herd.” This description has been judged slanderous by 19th- and 20th-century French-Canadian historiography.

Engraved by Pierre Dupin (1690-1751) in the manner of Antoine Watteau, Départ pour les îles illustrates the deportation of prostitutes (filles de joie) to America, about whom the caption refers ironically in these terms: “Let us away; you must leave without our prayers, Little Darlings....”

The 1753 edition of Abbé Prévost’s famous Manon Lescaut (1731), published in Paris and Amsterdam, included a remarkable series of engravings illustrating the misadventures of the chevalier des Grieux. The last two images depict the deportation of Manon Lescaut to Louisiana and her death in “a savage American land.”